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t is that time of the year. However, monsoon in Lahore has been different this year. It seeped into my soul, disquieting the stillness that I thought I carried within.
It is strange how adulting brings an enhanced sense of awareness about the inevitability of life. When the skies break open, I find myself captivated in the black waters of memory and nostalgia. The dense foliage along the canal, draped in heavy showers of rain, encloses the city in a silent melancholy, each raindrop turning and twisting something weird inside me. Lahore becomes a mirror then, reflecting not only its own history but also the fragments of my past I thought I had left behind.
As I let my soul and body get drenched in the rain, I wish it would carry me back to the innocence of childhood days. Running around barefoot in the courtyard with my siblings, the terrazzo floor cool beneath our feet, with arms unfurled, whirling under the skies with a certainty that the raindrops carried the power to rejuvenate us.
It’s surprising how the soil breathes out the same ineffable fragrance of dampness, the rooftops echo the same pitter-patter of rain, like tablas struck in the distance. Yet, the joy feels distant, like an echo from an ancestral home abandoned decades ago. Now when the rain pours, it brings with it the longing for a time that is evasive like smoke vanishing in thin air: my people, our shared memories, and a past I can no longer return to.
In these rain-drenched days, even the canal running through the heart of Lahore, carries a reminiscing nostalgia-laden beauty. Once, its waters boomed with the thrill of divers seeking relief from scorching summers; now, in the thick of the monsoon, it resembles a scanty river of memory, carrying with it fragments of an era that can never be reclaimed. Just like The Mall, where colonial facades quietly recall a long-gone era.
Year after year has passed, and now, walking through my college in the monsoon rain, I find myself pausing at the courtyards where the laughter of young women lingers on, their voices in perfect harmony with the melody of rain falling. Today, the drizzle on its red-brick, rustic walls seems to speak of past years and tales of sisterhood left behind. I wander around every nook and cranny, and every step feels like walking into a dim echo of a half-remembered dream. Though I stand among them now as an instructor, I cannot help but feel the faint resonance of a distant realm, when such mirth might have been my own.
I know my story is sewn into Lahore’s like phulkari embroidery, every thread carrying a memory and preserving its forgotten romance. Lately, experiencing monsoon in Lahore makes me feel like I am both a spectator and bearer of an unspoken grief and inexplicable joy that I share with it. The city guards many of my memories as faithfully as its monuments hold history.
The monsoon in Lahore is more than just weather. It is intimacy, joy, sorrow and love mixed under the cloak of bygone times. It teaches me that permanence is only an illusion; cities change, people leave and moments dissolve into temporal time.
Paradoxically, it is this transience that endures beauty, assuring me that each ending paves way for what is yet to come in life.
Qurat-ul Ain Khalil is alecturer at Kinnaird College for Women University, Lahore